A few points about this: This kind of thing would have been fine on Actualizer, so why not put it there. Also, it turns out I already had an old blogger blog, called Emlyn’s Random Tech, which was basically the same thing. Conclusion: I am a massive loser, with no clue.

Come on, that’s a bit harsh! The thinking is this:

Actualizer was a bit of a non-starter, so it can go die.

Emlyn’s Random Tech was more me trying to make a chatty techy place that you might go. Also it is on blogger, which is so four years ago, embarrassment! (Actually I was having a poke around in the admin side of things there, it’s fine, but I do like wordpress a whole lot better, not the least because it’s free software. It looks better too).

More seriously, many of my previous blogs (including this one, yay!) were solutions looking for a problem.

EmlynTech is a solution to a problem, and the problem was that I often solve tricky technical problems, but have no method of remembering the solutions in a useful way. This leads to:

Starting from scratch on problems that I should already know how to solve

Not sharing my solutions with others who might have the same problem

Sucks man. In the past I’ve tried all kinds of ways of remembering – stick stuff in a Word document, or email stuff to myself, I even once bought personal “knowledge base” software. All these are ephemeral, and only solve the first problem.

It suddenly clicked the other day that publishing these solutions on the web is the way to go. I noticed that my old blogs that I had forgotten about are still there, many years later. Also, if I search on specific subjects that were in those blogs via google, the blog entries come up. Google indexes blogs well, and blogs seem to be resilient over time. By George!

So EmlynTech is a place for me to stick solutions to problems for myself and others, and by adding to the great conversation of the internet, I enrich at least my future self as well as other people. An added bonus is that I write it up a little more carefully if I think other people might read it. Nice.